The present invention relates generally to computer telephony, and more particularly to an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology in a telecommunications network.
An Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system is a software application that accepts a combination of voice telephone input and touch-tone keypad selection and provides appropriate responses. An IVR system is usually a part of a larger application that includes database access.
An IVR system uses an embedded software application and has been in commercial use for several years. For example, banks often use an IVR system to allow customers to perform fiscal transactions such as updating the bank account using a telephone or Internet connection. Large businesses routinely use IVR systems in call centers to route incoming calls. Typically in a call center IVR system, to resolve a product issue, a customer dials a customer care telephone number and enters a sequence of touch-tone keypad inputs. After obtaining relevant information regarding the issue, the call center IVR system either presents an issue resolution, or simply logs the issue for further investigation. Additionally, movie theaters use IVR systems for selective information lookup such as finding movie schedules, theater locations etc.
Conventional IVRs require specialized architectures to support large applications, and databases containing records for thousands of application users. Consequently IVRs have been implemented in the existing telecommunications network to handle only large applications. Hence, domestic users and small businesses have been unable to enjoy the benefits of an IVR system due to unavailability of a small scale and low cost IVR system.
The small scale and IVR system service node was unavailable because the conventional IVRs employed the long-established Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for information transmission. Under PSTN circuit-switched calls, a communication channel was exclusively dedicated to a conversation for its duration, hence the 64 kbps connection could not be used for any other conversation regardless of whether the caller or the called party talked or remained silent.
As a result, the telephone service provider had to bill the calling party for the use of the line for the entire duration of the call. Hence, IVR systems were too costly for domestic users or small business. Realistically, if a small scale IVR system was introduced under the conventional PSTN system, each domestic user would have blocked a channel of communication for the duration of a call, which was not feasible since the number of potential domestic users far exceeded the number of available communication channels.
Therefore, a problem is presented in that a personal IVR system must be provided for the benefit of small businesses and domestic users. It is also required that the personal IVR system avoid using the PSTN for signal transmission, since using the PSTN for signal transmission is likely to result in bottlenecking the existing communication channels. What is needed is a node provisioning system capable of offering the benefits of conventional IVR systems to domestic users and small businesses that will use the network resources only when needed. What is needed is an alternative mode of information transmission that can offer the preferred capacity of using the bandwidth of a communication channel only when needed.